PayPal have decided that having their developer tools on the X.commerce website was holding them back. That’s why last week they relaunched the PayPal Developer Site, which was rolled into X.commerce in 2011.
When X.commerce launched, PayPal Access was the crown jewel of the announcements. In fact most of the really interesting stuff (not that there’s been very much) that’s come out of X.commerce in the last two years has been PayPal related.
Now PayPal are moving away from X.commerce (although of course they’ll still work with any other X.commerce tools), relaunching their own developer site, promising that it “gives developers a single location for our sandbox, tools, documentation, and resources they need to build innovative applications”.
That’s great for PayPal, but what about X.commerce? It’s had practically zero effect on eBay and we’ve yet to hear of the massive suite of new utilities that the developer community were supposed to produce. In 2011 X.commerce was supposed to become the new fabric for ecommerce, now it appears relegated to little more than a Magento developer platform (although of course most Magento developers do quite well without making their plugins X.commerce enabled).
When we first wrote about X.commerce in October 2011 the title was “X.Commerce – Move along, nothing to see here (yet)“. We were right, there’s still nothing to see (yet).
3 Responses
Howdy Chris,
I personally found X.commerce almost useless, once you have the eBay dev keys, then there is no reason to return other than getting the app signed off.
Besides that the eBay API’s are quicker to explore on their own sites and the forums, full of escort girls apparently https://www.x.com/developers/x-commerce-developer-home/forums/x-commerce-general-discussion
Great idea, just rarely used.
Oh and thanks for the heads up on the PayPal API moving 🙂
Matt
Thanks god for that. xCommerce is way ahead of it’s time. ecommerce platforms are so different architecturally that having a single ecommerce ecosystem just doesn’t work (yet). Even if it’s under the same umbrella.
Give it another 10 years and xCommerce as a single entity for ecommerce platform coms would be relevant.